Forms of Forgetting in Antiquity
How does forgetting shape cultural memory in antiquity? How were Greek and Latin texts used to make people forget?
Project Description
Forgetting in Antiquity is a cutting-edge topic that is almost completely confined to historical studies about censure and erasure. My project aims to study more subtle forms of forgetting in literature such as techniques of focussing (constructions of exempla or canons; selecting information) and replacing (new semantizations; new contextualizations). I plan to establish a detailed typology of different forms of forgetting. These forms of forgetting shall be described as the counterpart of strategies of remembering. Thus forgetting is supposed to receive a role as important as remembering for shaping cultural memory. On the basis of this theoretical background about forgetting I will apply modern sociological and philosophical concepts and theories of cultural memory as well as concepts of discourse and power to Latin and Greek texts.
Selected Publications
Die Stimme in der antiken Rhetorik, Hypomnemata 194, Göttingen 2014.
‘Rhetoric and Medicine: The Voice of the Orator in two Ancient Discourses’, Rhetorica 34 (2), 2016, 141-162.
‘Historiography and Panegyric. The Deconstruction of Imperial Representation in Cassius Dio’, in: Carsten H. Lange, Jesper M. Madsen (edd.): Cassius Dio ‒ Greek Intellectual and Roman Politician, Leiden/Boston 2016, 276-296.